Are you sitting comfortably?

Prepare yourself for a shock.

Are you sitting down? (Of course you are; you're at the computer, aren't you?)

The news is: I haven't been feeling particularly creative lately.

It's this, that and the other thing. Maybe my brain is seizing up. Screeech! Summer now seems to have fled the scene for good, and I'm working on articles for our annual winter issue. I can't begin to tell you how happy that makes me. Wonderful. Six months of winter, on deck.

Well, like most stuff in life, it is what you make of it. Right at the moment, I'm a bit down at the prospect of winter coming. But after winter there's spring, and then summer. Spring is only six or seven months away, depending on whether it's a late spring or not.

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There is big news at our house. We have added another cat. May I introduce you to Max (his shelter name) ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/MeetMax-10-08.jpg[/IMG]

Max--that name may be changed--was acquired from the local animal shelter. He is a male cat who was already neutered. He is about 3 1/2 years old, bright orange, as you can see, and comparatively thin. He is friendly and likes to be petted. Purr, purr, purr.

My naive hope was that Charlie was looking for a friend, someone she can play with, since Maggie still hisses at Charlie when she goes by. Such has not been the case. We brought Max home yesterday, in the late afternoon. Once Charlie realized that the pet taxi came home with an occupant, she started hissing. And growling. Charlie knows cat words that I have never heard before. One sounds like "Oyyyyy, yoy-yoy-yoy-yoy-yoyyyyy!" (Normally, Charlie "talks" a lot as she goes around the house; some cats do, and others don't.)

One time yesterday, she put her ears down (first time I ever saw her do that) and hissed and then chased Max upstairs. They both went under our bed. I followed them and heard them hissing at each other. That's all that happened. For the most part, they have stayed apart today. But my wife said they started having a conversation just before noon. She knew what to do: She turned on the vacuum cleaner. That ended the discussion immediately: One cat went one way, and the other went another.

Another issue must be resolved: Max has not been declawed. We are hoping we won't have to do this. This evening, we tried to trim her claws with a fingernail clipper--something we hadn't done since we had Princess (that cat that preceded Frisky, who is the cat that preceded Charlie). Max must have been declawed before, but he didn't want to cooperate with us, so we let him go. He is not scratching furniture; just the carpets, and most of our carpets at home aren't much to speak of. He does that when he's happy, sort of kneading his paws on the floor. When we had lunch together today, Max went around and around the table, brushing against our legs and getting petted.

I want to tell you a little about Max's history, too. Charlie came to the shelter as a kitten. Max arrived there around New Year's--he had been at the shelter for 10 months until this week. The story is that he was found as a stray, and they discovered he had an abcess in his mouth, which was causing him pain. The vet took care of that. According to the shelter's bio, "Max wants a nice indoors home. He doesn't want to be outside any more." At one point, they told us, he got depressed and stopped eating. He is still thin. Much lighter than Charlie, who had gotten rather rotund in her time with us.

I just hope that he and Charlie will be able to get along better. I feel pretty bad about the way things have turned out. If I had known Charlie would be this way about it ...

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Tonight, I'm upstairs, writing, with the Red Wings game on the little TV to my left. I'm up here by myself. If this were a perfect world, I would have at least a cat here to keep me company. But this is not a perfect world, is it?

Usually stuff like that doesn't bother me that much. Tonight it is.